


yours is no unique condition

by sodiumflare



Category: Firefly, Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, veiled reference to previous sexual assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:36:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4687487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a secret burning up Will Graham's brain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yours is no unique condition

"Don't you understand?" she whispers urgently. She isn't there. She hasn't been there for a long time. "Don't you see?"

There's a secret burning up Will Graham's brain, but he can't quite remember what it is.

\--

Will Graham has a mop of curly hair, like a shepherd in an old Greek myth. Its general unruliness is made worse by his tendency to run his hands through his hair when stressed. He's stressed pretty frequently these days. His handlers think it’s a tic. It's not a tic.

Under the hair are scars, curving in curlicues around his skull. Some of the cuts were shallow, just cutting into surface tissue. Some were much, much deeper.

Sometimes, when he touches the scars, he can almost remember.

\--

The worst scenes are from Reavers.

In standard murders and mutilations, there's some semblance of order: some reasoning, some justification, some reason that the perpetrator felt made his actions make sense. It's a slim sliver of hope that Will Graham hangs onto like a shield: for some reason, somehow, those deaths can mean something when he's crawled inside the killer's head and made himself at home. He can take that reasoning, can make it into a stone and swallow it down.

Reaver sites are just the opposite. There's no order, no reason, just mindless - something. He doesn't have a word for it. He takes it, he's a good boy, he takes it and swallows it but it just churns in his gut like worms trapped in a child's clenched hands.

Will steps into the darkened ship. Jack and the team are behind him, well back; they've learned by now not to get too close at scenes like this.

Will rounds a corner, finds the first girl. She's not alive but he sees her blink, smile through her ruined face before an axe cleaves her face off.

He drops to his knees and vomits efficiently.

He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Beverly has a bottle of water ready when he reaches for it; he takes it, swishes out, stands, moves on.

\--

She's standing in front of him. Hair tousled, face ghost-pale but cheeks flushed. Eyes wide and dazed, seeing nothing and everything - until they focus, abruptly, on him. "Not supposed to know," she whispers, but her lips aren't moving.

He steps forward. He has held many secrets. He can hold this one, too.

River opens her mouth, and he leans forward, places his almost over hers.

She exhales, and he breathes her in like smoke, it catches in this throat, and then he's coughing and gagging and -

When they find him in the corridor the next morning, he's been unconscious for six hours and River Tam is long, long gone.

\--

A normal murder today. Domestic dispute. Quiet, orderly; viscera loosed on an antique carpet in an oak-paneled room.

The roast is furry with mold. Zeller gags, and Will tastes the bile rising in his throat, sympathetic in every sense, and –

“Clear the room,” Beverly barks, herding the techs outside; she pauses before she follows them, looks back like she wants to say something, doesn’t. In the silence, Will breathes in the room: holiday decorations and rancid dumplings and the blank spaces where there were photos on the walls. Smells the fear, the sudden joy and anguish and –

He knocks on the door frame, and the team files in. “It was their son,” he says. “Their son killed them. Can we leave now?”

Back in the van, he rests his head against the cool transparisteel. His head is pounding. “Can I have –“ he begins, and Price presses two pills into his palm. Will swallows them dry.

\--

Back on Earth-That-Was, some cultures held the belief that a designated man could absorb the sins of others. Sin-eaters, they called them. A sacrificial lamb chosen to consume the transgressions of an entire community: one man damned to hell so that others might live forever.

Not a bad gig, if you ain't the one doing the eating.

Will Graham grew up on in a tiny house in a tiny town on a tiny moon. Homesteads had been cheap - some terraforming issues had left the atmosphere permanently muggy. There was just too much water everywhere. St-Clair, as it was known, wasn't much for crops, but there was decent fishing so long as you didn't mind that the fish generally tasted like mud.

Small towns have a lot of secrets, and small towns don't much like it when one lonesome boy can tell your sins just by looking at you. Will is vast; he contains multitudes. There were a lot of sins in St-Clair, and it was maybe lucky for him that another child (Annabelle Chen, two years his senior and a decade prettier) happened to mention him in a candidacy interview when the Companion recruitment folks came calling. Annabelle wasn't chosen - no one on St-Clair ever was - but the house mistress surely did take an interest in Will. An emissary from the Alliance's Ministry of Education came calling a week later. There was an Academy, she said. The most exclusive. The most challenging programs. All expenses paid.

When he got there - first trip out of atmo, first trip off-planet, and he spent the first day vomiting in the white room they wouldn't let him out of because it was the quietest it had ever been inside his brain - River Tam was waiting.

"I see you," she said, and she meant it.

\--

There were – surgeries. Tests. Long blank gaps in his memory of nothing, the slate color of the sky before a storm and a dull buzz like the Cortex out of sync. Waking up with scars, without scars, with fresh scars and shaved skin and once, a long, shiny burn curled around his right bicep.

Before, he could – know things, sometimes, without asking or speaking. His mama’d said it was like a bird singing in his ear, and maybe it was. Just little things, things no one'd wanted him to know, but small sins.

By the time they were done with him, he was drifting in an ocean of sound and intention and heartbeats the sour aftertaste of other people’s bad dreams and fevered sweats and –

They could use that. He’s attached to a forensic investigation team – they bring him to crime scenes, and leave him alone, and sometimes he can tell them – things. Sometimes he can’t. Sometimes it’s Reavers, and that’s – well, it’s – Reaver scenes are an endless howl, lips curled back above bloodied teeth. There’s not much he can do with that.

The team is – good, mostly. Jack wants results. The techs rubberneck like ducks, but they treat him like –

He remembers, sometimes, back in the lab, when the surgeons –

The techs treat him like a person.

\--

Usually the techs bring him his meals, but sometimes more senior members of the management team step in. Dr. Bloom brings him books, sometimes, asks how he’s doing. Dr. Chilton asks him repetitive questions and wonders what Will looks like on the inside.

Will doesn’t talk much. There’s not much to say, and his jaw has persistently hurt since one of the surgeries, like his teeth don’t line up quite right. Talking is for scenes; talking isn’t for -

Tonight, Dr. Bloom brings bao (“It’s soggy, sorry – I keep telling them…”) and picks up the Yevtushenko she’d left last week. “How are you, Will?”

There’s a butterfly bandage over his left temple; he slipped in blood and whacked his head against a table at their last crime scene (single woman, in her 30s, dark hair, and left without her kidneys. Her heels, discarded, slippery with blood. She was alive when she was cut). Alana moves towards him, telegraphing the movement, and he tips his head towards her, leans into her touch.

He hasn't answered her question, and she doesn't expect him to. It's one of the nice things about Dr. Bloom.

“This is healing nicely,” she murmurs. Her fingers linger on the terminus of a surgical scar wending out past his hairline like a creek.

How are you, Will?

\--

He's never understood why they bring him to Reaver scenes. You can't arrest a Reaver. He knows Dr. Bloom hates it. But Dr. Chilton thinks Will Graham will be his ticket to perhaps fame, possibly fortune, and ideally a comfortable university position where he can play with research subjects like Will all the time (he hopes they'll be less - messy than Will, though).

Dr. Bloom just wants him to sleep through the night.

\--

Zeller brings him dinner that night, as well as a yo-yo (“So they said I can’t give you anything with string, so they made me take that out, but – “). Zeller likes to talk to him, like Zeller’s a show on the Cortex while Will eats, and Zeller says, “I guess Chilton’s been pushing for you to do more Reaver scenes – I’m sorry, we hate them, too – and Dr. Bloom’s threatening to go over his head but technically he has seniority, so there’s only so much – “

They wind up sitting in Will’s room, rolling the stringless yo-yo back and forth between them like a particularly staid game of fetch. Zeller doesn’t expect Will to talk, and they don’t. It’s nice.

\--

Another Reaver hit.

There was an old way of killing people on Earth That Was: you'd tie someone's limbs up, each to a different horse (a horse for the leg, a horse for the other leg...) and then spook them all into bolting. He doesn't know how he knows this, but he's looking at it now.

A gelding shies away when he approaches, eyes rolling, ears flattened back. His withers are smeared in dried blood. He doesn't know what he's done, didn't have a choice anyway, and Will holds out a hand for him to sniff; strokes his cheek and neck. Gradually, the pulse under his fingers slows. Will prefers animals to people. They’re quieter.

There's a leg hanging from a strap wrapped around the gelding's belly, exposed bone jagged and shining. The man was terrified when he died. They always are.

"What," he finally asks, looking to Dr. Chilton, "Do you _want_ from me here?"

He can feel Beverly grinning behind her hair.

\--

Price is leading him down the hall back to his room when they pass an open consulting room; it’s Chilton, sending a wave at a disused terminal, voice tight like a piano wire. “But _could_ he - ?”

\--

This is a dream.

She's in front of him, and this is a dream, he knows, because nothing hurts. There are no scars beneath his fingers.

"I tried to tell you," she says. "I tried to share it with you."

"I know," he says.

There was something his mother used to say: "Half burden, double joy."

He can feel it, like a coal in his brain. He can't get inside.

"But I found it," she says. "I found it and now we're free.” She steps forward, raises her mouth to his. “Let me show you."

\--

When he wakes, he can feel it, a thing with wings tucked inside his careful grasp.

Beverly sets his breakfast tray on the cot. "It's porridge again. Yuck. Sorry."

There's a drizzle of honey across the steaming mush. There's only ever honey when Beverly brings breakfast. Sometimes, Dr. Bloom brings him small bowls of berries.

This matters, now, suddenly, matters like a blow to the head and stuns him like an ox.

He knows their sins. He knows all of their sins, he always has, he can't not, but -

He can taste the order of them, the ones that matter and the ones that don't, like honey on his tongue. Dr. Bloom is having an affair with a former professor, grows berries in boxes on her windows; Zeller and Price slept together once a decade ago and never really got over it; Beverly hates her niece and doesn’t pay her traffic tickets. Dr. Chilton is a mediocre researcher and a devoted father and a patron of the arts and he prefers slightly burned toast and a decade ago, he drafted a white paper that suggested the creation of an aggression suppressant, to be piloted on a lone world –

Will weighs it against his heart.

Beverly turns to leave.

"Wait," he says. "I have something to tell you."

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Yevgeny Yevtuskenko's "Zima Junction."


End file.
